So it’s been a mother of a week. Moving server turned into the week of living hell…..but we’re back now and everything is beautiful. That geek thing is a foreign country to me and despite being (sort of) conversational about some stuff, when you get a little deeper in it all gets very, very cloudy.
Oh well.
Next week we will be posting again as normal and I will be a lot less sleepy (and when I say sleepy you can read that as grumpy)
Maybe we needed the break.
I feel like an injured player who’s been sitting on the sidelines for half the season, just about to come off the bench.
serendipidous discoveries are always a little sweeter.
how i happened across brown bird is a story of internet enthusiasm. trying to buy my aunt an early christmas present from the very beautiful ferdinand homestore i received an email back from di, who runs it telling me not only how to buy lovely things from her but also about her husband’s record label, peapod recordings which she thought we might like.
i should know to trust a lady who picks out lucite brooches not much bigger than a penny to sell.
when you explain your label by saying “the double ended shape of the Peapod makes it excellent for maneuvering around rocky shores that larger boats cannot get close to”, then resistance is futile.
meandering about peapod’s site i came across mention of brown bird and being a fan of all things brown and birdlike i followed their flightpath and happened across this gem. though they’re not on peapod, head gardener- ron harrity has engineered and maybe produced (sorry i don’t know) the delightfully named ‘the map room project’ with the band over the new england summer.
in that beautiful ‘ahh, its a small, small world’ way i notice they’re playing with friends of a few friend’s denison witmer later in the year too.
this track is from their most recent (until the map room project is unleashed) album, such unrest. it’s that soft, slow, fuzzy, folky americanism that i’m so partial to. maybe it’s my recently re-awoken nesting instinct which this track appeals to with its woodsmoke cabin atmosphere and fears of familial commitment romanticism, but lead vocalist david lamb has a fragile, world weary whisper like tillman’s or damien jurado or will oldham and it makes me long for autumn twilights and patchwork quilts. a sweet female voice wends its way round the track enveloping the questions, banjo strum and slide guitar like a scent and its over before you’ve grasped it’s begun.
more (hopefully) from peapod over the coming months until then; nest with the brown bird.
So we started our move to a new hosting company over the weekend. We lost a couple of days due to my ham-fisted lack of geekiness but hopefully from here on out we will have a less interrupted service.
Weird thing was, even though it was only down a couple of days I really missed it.
We will try to get back to something like normal as soon as we can.
i feel i should apologise for the lack of new music round these parts of late. not that i’m apologising for what we have posted, since it’s all been killer.
i’ve been spending a little quality time with my archives recently, letting the shuffle function lead the way and this tracks familiar malladry (i think just made that word up) seeped into my journey to work this morning.
i’m starting to get used to how life changes, everything’s a little upside down at the moment - the weather is so consistently out of season that i’m becoming accustomed to wearing thick woollen cardigans in mid summer; so listening to late-night gitane-flavoured pastoral blues on the way to work seems to fit too.
i’m having a hard time believing that this album came out five years ago - both in the sense that it feels so much older and still quite undiscovered. beth gibbons & rustin man’s out of season was an odd release for 2002 that didn’t fit in to any particular movement that was going on at the time, nor did it spark a swathe of smokey, fuzzed-out, sweepy, bluesy tributes but instead stands on its own aside from the mess and muddle of bandwagon jumping and scenesterism with some outstanding pieces of musical production, lush orchestral soundscapes, and poetic lyrics.
it almost feels like the soundtrack to a movie that will never get made; songs to follow images which can’t ever come to fruition and therefore only part of a bigger picture. its an oddly melancholic but comforting album, otherworldly and strangely uplifting.
sort of like having winter in the middle of the summertime.
i’m in throws of organisation, which means little proper work of any kind is getting done.
it means furrowed brows and fractured conversations as i remember some other relatively pointless detail i’ve forgotten in the compilation of my list to end all lists.
so this is an apology to the people around me, i will not be consumed by upcoming events and will try to spend more time listening to prog rock.
ok, that might not be true but for some reason this week i’ve been really getting into king crimson. a quick wiki of them revealed all the usual prog facts; rapidly changing rosters, failing to recruit elton john and bryan ferry in various line-up changes.
king crimson are the maiden aunt of a huge chunk of the british rock family tree (covering in various incarnations yes, elp, foreigner, bad company amongst others) but their early incarnation is the only one i’ve ever engaged with.
repubilican former hearthrob vincent gallo harbours a transparent crimson crush, using the song, moonchild in a beautiful scene in buffalo 66, working out references in his own compositions with varying success at concealing them and that’s probably where i came across them first. but in the court of the crimson king is an astonishingly listenable album - for all of prog’s reputation for tedious noodling free jazz sections and netherworld-fantasy topographies. even this track, clocking in at over seven minutes and resplendent in polyrhythmic saxophone and percussion breaks is catchy in the old rock sense, just try getting that hook out of your head before bedtime…
Spent sometime getting into imovie on the train to my parents on friday-it’s really simple to use, but not quite as precise a thing as I (being a little OCD) would like. I put a soundtrack to this awesome video of a star with a comet’s tail (via bb)- the track is the ’still going theme’ by dfa record’s latest still going btw.
Over at basilika we’ve started a new feature guiding lights which puts together the best bits of the hundreds of mp3 blogs we listen to into a bite-sized 30 min mix. Check it out.
The big news of the weekend was the birth of mika charlotte to hl alumnia jez -congrats to the family proctor (expect lots of gentle, uplifting piano music on innersounds for the next few weeks)
Speaking of gentle and uplifting the weekend also saw the death oh Jon Lucien, who’s music has touched and inspired me for many, many years.
R.I.P.
Here’s something to remember him by and to celebrate the birth of the youngest M.C.
last night in a sea of checked shirts, canvas sneakers and willfully tousled facial hair (not mine; other peoples) i watched the newly renamed bill callahan play a fantastic show in camden.
it was a simple, plain, brown bread type gig; no flashy lights, no stage sets, no choreographed show tunes instead just a quiet illustration of his song writing on stage from the man who looks not unlike an enigmatic, peripatetic maths tutor. if you’re not familiar with smog, (smog) or bill callahan do take a little time to get acquainted. on first glance, he may look like the sort of guy who you’d hate to get stuck in a lift with - too dull, too shy and too pedestrian to be entertaining, but the closer you listen to his weary baritone and persistent strumming; the more he draws you in. funny and perceptive, tired and endearing there’s a world-weary, out of place-ness in everything he’s recorded which fits me like a comfortably worn out sweater.
maybe i’m still in awe of callahan’s lyricism, or it might be those more-than-several cans of red stripe i enjoyed last night are suppressing my usually ebullient prose either way here’s something for the weekend from bill before he dropped the parenthesis.
Zipping through Paris, a couple of weeks ago, on a date with destiny (and the greatest egg restaurant the world has ever known) I was momentarily distracted from the beautiful girl at my side, the sunshine beating down, and the taxi driver taking chances with our lives, by a radio station that seemed to be playing all the right music (in all the right order)- Heavy jazz standards, sleazy latin bangers and that soulful mid-tempo beat-y thing the french seem to pull off so well-’tous’ killer ‘pas de’ filler is how I describe it to my (imaginery) Parisian posse.
Long time readers of the blog will know where this is headed-that this fits into the broader trend of ‘hl love for all things french’;
any kind of cheese and ham based cuisine? check;
gitanes, dirty black coffee and pastries at Le Pain Quotidien? check;
stripey clothes and general poutiness? check alors!!
And despite certainly seeing life through rose (and rose´) tinted glasses that weekend, I think it’s safe to say that Radio Nova falls into the narrow yet deep category of things-that-the-French-do-so-well(-that-we-do-not).
Back in dark London streets, where commercial radio has struggled so valiantly to program out any kind of personality or edge or life, it’s hard to imagine being able to listen to a station that plays consistently interesting and soulful music all day every day.
Thankfully for us deprived Londoners, Radio Nova have stream which you can listen if you’re online. So if your day gets a bit too much and you need reminding of that quixotic parisian moment (or two)-check them out, and in the meantime here’s a little something from some of paris’ greatest (all dubbed out by one of London’s).
air-cassanova70 (brendan lynch mix)
since weboth geeked out over the trailer/concept for be kind, rewind last week i’ve been loop-de-looping the billy preston track which plays over the second half of the trailer -in my experience sometimes the only way to exorcise a niggling hook like that is to share it.
so here goes.
the thing is the more i listen, the more i love that rumbling bass, classic brass section and shuffling percussion, the barely there banjo line and honky tonk piano break. despite some ropey lyrics and my ambivalence towards preston himself i just love this track in all it’s am-radio, late-night dance show glory, and not only that, but its making me want to dig out a whole section of my music i’ve not spent any time with for years - which, i suppose is sort of getting something from nothing from nothing…
